Who is running for president?

In class we learned that it was rational to be ignorant in terms of knowledge about candidates. A recent poll shows how very ignorant we can be, in that many people do not even know who is running for president.

“A chart on the Google Trends website shows the skyrocketing popularity of a search for the term, 'who is running for president.'"

This makes sense given what we have discussed in class. Because the probability of one’s vote deciding an election is so small, the marginal benefit of voting is infinitesimal, even with a large benefit differential between candidates. In the case of a benefit differential of 100,000 dollars and a p of 1/100,000,000 the marginal benefit of voting would be .001 dollars.  If you look at the opportunity cost of voting just in terms of lost wages and you earned minimum wage, it would take you ($.001/$7.25/hr)*(3600 secs/hr) = .497 seconds (approximately one-half seconds of wages) to earn as much at work as the marginal benefit of voting. Thus, unless you can become informed and vote in less than one-half second, you would be rational to be ignorant (because MC > MB) and not know much more than who the candidates are (if this at all). With analysis such as this, it is easy to see how this trend on Google came about.